The New York Times carried an article by Janny Scott yesterday that clarified something I’ve been struggling with for a week or so now. I keep hearing people say that “the” Obama speech is so wonderful because race is “finally” on the table during an election campaign. I keep wanting to correct this without diminishing what Obama accomplished in that speech, because I want to argue that race is ALWAYS on the table in American elections. And the NYT made that point this morning, with a nice summary of the significance of racial themes in presidential campaigns.

Episodically, presidential campaigns are overtly, explicitly, and clearly about race. During these elections, people talk about slavery, or “the Negro problem.” But mostly, race is the elephant in the room, exploited by candidates but never actually mentioned. So Nixon could appeal to his “silent majority,” and Reagan could castigate “welfare mothers,” and we all knew what was meant but we didn’t have to acknowledge it.

Obama has opened a door that Bill Clinton tried to open: Clinton wanted to begin a national conversation on what race means to us and how we might best deal with it. That effort was, of course, like much of his second term, derailed by the Lewinsky mess. But that door may well be opening now.

This is not without risk for Obama, for many attribute at least some of his remarkable political success to his ability to be “just Black enough,” to straddle racial categories, and to finesse the racial issue while also exploiting it. Obama symbolizes the complexities of race, but he does so implicitly; this makes it risky for him to voice these things, to make the implicit explicit.

And I am reminded of nothing more than the argument between the two therapists on HBO’s series In Treatment, in which one takes the position that the fully conscious person would be paralyzed, unable to act; that the subconscious exists in order to allow us to function. The other argues that the pain of our lives can only be excised by looking carefully at it. It struck me as I watched this that timing is everything: that ignoring one’s painful past can indeed be useful—right up to the moment when it isn’t.

Race, which is so much a part of the American subconscious, has been at this moment for a long time—we cannot continue to ignore it and still function as a nation. Whatever else his candidacy has done, if Barack Obama can begin this long-delayed conversation, he will have done this country an inestimable service.